Lyd & Andrew are getting married! This is exciting! They are adorable! I'll stop using exclamation marks now! (!!!!!!) (Just had to get those last few out of my system.)

Whytecliff Park in West Van is a favourite haunt of nearly every Vancouver photographer, and it's easy to see why. (Not so easy to keep all the other people out of the background of every photo, however.) And the mystical, magical green forest at the beginning of the session? That was a little corner right next to the parking lot - just to give you some context.

We were blessed with beautiful light in this beautiful place with these beautiful people, and these photos make my heart happy.

It's the time of year again when I spend hours and hours culling images from the past 12 months, and then culling through the culled images, and then closing my eyes and deleting images at random, and still...still, I have too many photos to share with you. Forgive me if loading this blog post crashed your computer; it will likely never be the same, and for that I apologize.

But I won't apologize for all the pretty light and all the amazing clients I've been blessed with. In this past year, I've learned that trying to edit with a busy toddler running around the apartment is kind of insane, and that blogging sessions is impossible. I've discovered a little bit more about the kinds of clients I love to photograph (many of which you'll see below), and also that becoming friends with your clients is basically the best kind of everything. I've pushed myself to occasionally photograph what I wouldn't normally. And also, I've found that taking on a couple projects for free, simply for the sake of passion, is actually incredibly inspiring, and that these shoots often become my favourites. So please, if you have a spectacular shoot idea or project, send me a message.

I loved photographing these two. Henrique is my husband Jorge's coworker at Giant Ant, where they create really cool moving things on screens. (That's the simple definition, where I describe what they do and forget to describe almost everything that they actually do. Ask Jorge if you want to get more technical.) Fernanda also works in animation (talk about a creative couple!) and paints adorable illustrations as well. For Fernanda's birthday, Henrique asked me to photograph a morning in their lives - and we happened to choose a sunny Saturday!

Henrique & Fernanda are Brazilian, and Brazilians have invented the most delicious food: Pão de Queijo. That means cheese bread, but the name is such an understatement. It's delicious and chewy and very very cheesy and I find myself craving it at the most inconvenient times. (It's also gluten free - using tapioca flour - which is cool.) So when I was in Brazil recently, I bought some tapioca flour and managed to get it home without any customs officials getting suspicious (it looked like white powder in an unlabelled plastic bag, so that was a relief) and made pão de queijo myself. AMAZING.

Anyways, that was just to let you know the identity of those little round biscuits they are eating in many of the photos, and partly just because I wanted to talk about cheesy bread because I'm craving it yet again. Also, Henrique & Fernanda's apartment is so awesome and unique and so very "them" - filled with art and light and delicious food and quirkyness. I had so much fun this day - thank you again, Henrique and Fernanda, for letting me document a tiny moment of your lives :)

Everything blurs together and then suddenly focuses. Our son was born, and that was the end of life as we knew it and the beginning of something full of blessing. This is our Matthias, our gift of God, a few hours after he was born. Every time I look at this picture, I remember the pain and exhaustion of standing up, of holding my camera steady in the low hospital light, but the knowing that I would want to have taken this photo. And every time I look at this picture, I am so glad that I did. He's not wrinkly anymore, or red, and his hair is much lighter and he's twice as big, and sometimes this photo makes me want to cry. So maybe this is my favourite photo of 2014.

But that's not it. In 2014, I met so many amazing people, so many happy families that laughed together. I captured so much joy, and that is what I want to share with you below.

(Disclaimer: I tried to choose just a few favourite photos of 2014. Truly.)

So before you start - this post is packed with photos. I don't even know how many photos it has, that's how many there are. Don't say I didn't warn you.

It made me smile to look back over all my 2013 sessions - so many amazing people I met and laughed with - families & couples & babies & moms & dads & stories, and each were beautiful in their own way. I feel so blessed to have met them and been chosen to document their stories.

I was recently doing a maternity session for a couple I've photographed before, and as I asked her to pose in some strange and uncomfortable position, I said, "I'm sorry - I bet you didn't come here expecting to have some crazy photographer tell you to do this!" She looked at her husband and laughed and said, "Actually, it was the same last time..."

:) So thank you to everyone who let me photograph you & who put up with all of my crazy ideas. Here's looking at 2014!